Women on the political left have spent donkey’s years arguing that sexism and inequality in relation to men cannot be postponed until after the ‘revolution’. In part, it was men and their macho quest for class war that enabled Russell Brand to operate in plain sight for so long. We all knew who Brand was, because he told us. Gross misogyny and an obvious messiah complex notwithstanding, the left was quite prepared to treat him as a useful idiot in a bid to lure disaffected young voters.
Take the socialist activist Owen Jones. During the 2015 election campaign, he argued that Brand offered Ed Miliband the best route to young voters, suggesting that the then Labour leader was to be commended for being brave enough to share a platform with him. While conceding Brand’s problematic attitude towards women, Jones still insisted that Russell Brand mattered: the politics outweighed the misogyny.
Jones says he met Brand only twice: once at a Guardian Live event to promote Brand’s book in 2014, and again a year later, when he interviewed him for The Big Issue. The mutual backslapping had begun earlier that same year with Jones’ first Guardian piece about Brand and continued with a second, massively sycophantic piece (also in the Guardian) the following year, in which Jones commanded his leftist disciples to stop being horrible about Brand.
After all, what’s a bit of sexism between dudebros?
Brand, readers were informed, had ‘acknowledged his own problematic attitude towards women but still need[ed] to work on it’. In a cringeworthy endorsement for Jones’ book, Brand even compared him to George Orwell, and when Jones returned the favour with his own endorsement (‘Funny, full of charm, and engaging’) his words went on the front cover.
After all, what’s a bit of sexism between dudebros when Brand was bringing grassroots campaigners into the left? Jones has since called his willingness to ‘overlook’ Brand’s ‘problematic behaviour’ as an ‘obvious misjudgement’. I wonder if he would have gone on stage with a person who had repeatedly made grossly racist comments, dressed up as ‘jokes’?
In 2006, during a live stand-up comedy performance broadcast by Channel 4, Brand joked about ‘blow jobs where mascara runs a little bit’. (For the avoidance of doubt, the joke is that the woman is crying because he is choking her.) Five years later, in a podcast interview, he joked that he had raped, then killed, a woman. And there is much, much more. But not so much as to deter a fellow posturing leftist from publicly praising this man. Women are mere collateral damage.
Leftist enablers already knew who Russell Brand was. Six years before Jones’ simpering performance on stage at the Guardian Live event, Brand, along with Jonathan Ross, had left obscene messages for actor Andrew Sachs in which he boasted about a sexual encounter with Sachs’s granddaughter. To this pair of male broadcasters, sexual humiliation and the bullying of an elderly man were fair game for the purpose of entertainment.
In 2014, the environmental journalist and left-wing campaigner George Monbiot (who fancies himself a bit more righteous than thou) described Brand as ‘the best thing that has happened to the left in years’. Over the weekend, Monbiot apologised for nominating Brand as a ‘hero’, saying he ‘should have read the signs better’.
Sexism on the left has a long and shameful history on both sides of the Atlantic. One Berkeley anti-war leader said of feminists in 1969, ‘Let them eat cock’. At Students for a Democratic Society meetings, ‘brothers’ reported their unique dreams for utopia; these included ‘free grass, free food, free women and free clothes’. Whenever women tried to criticise male chauvinism within the movement, their actions were mocked. Such sexism prompted the feminist critiques of the New Left that would later develop into the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
For generations, women on the socialist left have been told, one way or another, that their liberation will follow the great struggle. First comes the class war; capitalism must be overthrown and the establishment defeated. Only then, perhaps, will anyone get around to thinking about the women. Brand’s political career was like a rock and roll version of the tired old socialist trope. The anti-capitalist rhetoric he spun even as he was accruing great personal wealth won him admirers among people who regarded themselves as champions of the oppressed. But his public persona was that of a sexual predator.
I am sometimes challenged, usually by women on the left, about why I reserve most of my anger for leftist men. My answer is straightforward: rank hypocrisy. They posture and present themselves as great friends of feminists who speak of right-wing men as the enemy – and against women’s rights. With those right-wing men who are against women’s progress or equality, you know where you stand. But so-called progressive men, supporting grotesquely abusive and exploitative capitalist industries such as prostitution and surrogacy, cannot have their cake and eat it. They need to be named and shamed as the sexists that they are.
It’s not about retrospectively blaming people who liked or worked with Russell Brand before realising that he was a sexual offender. It’s that they should have known all along that he was a sexual predator but chose to put it to one side, pending the revolution. As Andrea Dworkin said:
To right-wing men, we are private property. To left-wing men, we are public property. In either case, we are not considered to be humans. We are things.
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